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Bleak Liberalism

January 19, 2018

Basic political beliefs guide our way of being in the world. For a long time, liberalism was one of the most powerful of these orienting ideas. But liberalism has been attacked from both the left and the right as inadequate to our time. In Bleak Liberalism, a deft blend of intellectual history and literary analysis, Brown University's Amanda Anderson ranges from Charles Dickens to Doris Lessing to take a new look at the robustness and subtlety of liberal thinking and the fate of those ideas in the past century.